After Holocaust horrors, woman reconnects with Jewish faith

Tuesday

Jan 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 27, 2009 at 11:06 PM

Ilse Stokkink’s only photo of her childhood in Nazi Germany is one of her grandmother blessing her. After fleeing for her life, Stokkink distanced herself from her Jewish faith. Now, she is reconnecting with her religious tradition.

Courtney Potts

Utica resident Ilse Stokkink held up an almost 80-year-old photo Monday.

In it, her grandmother, head covered in clean white, holds a ringed hand to an 8- or 9-year-old Stokkink’s dark, bobbed head and blesses her during Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.

She didn’t know it then, when she and her family were enjoying a comfortable existence in Germany, but it would be almost a lifetime before Stokkink, now 87, would return to those strong Jewish roots.

“After Hitler, I was never really comfortable with being Jewish,” she admits. “I don’t like it very much. There is still too much discrimination going on, really.”

Born Ilse Rosenthal, Stokkink grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family at a time when Jewish was the last thing anyone living in Germany wanted to be. She left her cultural identity behind when she married a Protestant she met through the Dutch resistance.

Only recently, after the death of her husband, has she begun returning to her family’s tradition.

‘Mightily scared’

As the daughter of a successful department store manager, Stokkink enjoyed an upper-middle-class life growing up, first in Plauen, near what was then the border with Czechoslovakia, and then Karlsruhe, between the Rhine River and the Black Forest.

She attended boarding school in Switzerland, where she was “polishing up to be a lady,” she said.

But as Hitler rose to power in Germany, that began to change.

At her public school, Jewish children were excused from saying “Heil Hitler” each day.

“If I did do it, my classmates knew I was cheating,” she said, “But if I didn’t do it, everyone knew I was Jewish. And I didn’t want to be Jewish.”

Stokkink’s childhood memories include bans on intermarriage, restrictions on what goods her family could buy and having to wear a yellow star.

Growing up in that environment, she said, left her “mightily scared.”

“Slowly and surely, more and more people disappeared,” she said.

It was 1938 when 16-year-old Stokkink and her father fled over the border into Holland, where her mother already was waiting for them.

The next two years were wonderful.

“I was a regular person,” she said. “I was no longer dirty trash or an outcast.”

That peace didn’t last long, however. By 1940, the Nazis invaded Holland. Most Jewish residents were rounded up and moved to a ghetto in Amsterdam, she said, but for about a year and a half the family hid in the attic of a business acquaintance.

The two-room living space included a small bed for her and a couch for her parents. A closet stored potatoes and turnips, and once a week the family would purchase a big loaf of rye bread from the black market.

Going underground

Although Holland was forced to surrender, many residents continued to fight against the Nazis. It was these people who helped the family make its next move.

On the appointed day, Stokkink and her family removed their stars, took a train two hours outside of the city, and met the resistance members who would lead them to the farm by bicycle.

Stokkink still remembers the string of wooden shoes stuffed with flowers, a symbol of the old Holland, hanging from the front door when they arrived.

In 1944, however, police raided the farm. Stokkink escaped being rounded up and sent to a concentration camp, but her mother wasn’t so lucky.

Her mother, she said, was taken to Auschwitz. And though the camp was freed the year after — Tuesday marked the 64th anniversary of its liberation — her mother was never heard from again.

Afterward, she and the farmer’s son, a former Dutch soldier present at the Bombing of Rotterdam, would eventually marry. It was with him that she experienced one of the most harrowing experiences of the war — an Allied air raid.

“It was almost like hell,” she said, struggling to describe the experience.

After the war

As time went on, it became clear the war was coming to an end.

The farm was located just 10 or 15 miles from the German front lines, so when they heard vehicles headed toward their home one day, tension struck.

“We didn’t know who it was, whether it was retreating Germans who would shoot us or the liberating army,” she said. “And it was the Canadians.”

Stokkink and her husband Willem (later William) moved to the United States a few years later, where they raised their three children in New York and California.

All those years, she practiced her husband’s Protestant faith instead of her childhood traditions.

That’s not unusual, said Utican Helen Sperling, 88, a Holocaust survivor whose name and that of her late husband are attached to an annual spring lecture locally about the continuing ramifications of the Nazi genocide.

Sperling said the horrors of that era had an impact on the faith of many Jewish people, including her own when she was in a concentration camp.

“I was very close to death,” Sperling said. “I thought maybe I’m not that sure about God.”

Yet she continued to ask God for help.

After World War II, Jews reacted in many different ways to the trauma of being persecuted for their faith, she said.

“Some of them said, ‘I don't want anything to do with it,’ and they never did,” Sperling said. “And some became more religious — it’s just amazing.”

Among the latter group was her husband, Leon, who did not grow up particularly religious but came to value his Jewish faith, she said.

As for Stokkink, she attended her first Jewish services in more than 50 years after her husband’s death four years ago.

When asked what brought her back to the religion, “I really don’t know,” she said.

“While my husband was alive, I led a Christian life and raised my children Christian,” she said.
“The Jewish faith is very strong, you know. It has a lot of tradition.”

Observer-Dispatch

ABOUT AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

It was established by Germans in 1940, in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that was annexed to the Third Reich by the Nazis. Its name was changed to Auschwitz.